


All Delighted People

by Mad_Max



Series: All Delighted People [2]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Credence Barebone/Gellert Grindelwald - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Manipulative Gellert Grindelwald, Manipulative Relationship, Percival Graves/credence Barebone - Freeform, Post-Movie 2: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-24 09:46:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17098265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Max/pseuds/Mad_Max
Summary: His name, Gellert says, is Aurelius. A molten, slippery word. A petal dropped from a poison flower. Try as he does, he cannot conform the rough shape of him to those liquid syllables.-Post Crimes of Grindelwald. Credence has to reconcile himself with the decisions he has made. Queenie is navigating the path she has chosen. Albus Dumbledore is confronted with one of his greatest and darkest mistakes.





	All Delighted People

**Author's Note:**

> This is just the preface and my first foray into fanfic in quite a while! Please let me know if you enjoy.

 

He can remember a shade of what it was to be smaller. Maybe five, a fledgling six. Afraid of everything he no longer fears, like shadows and thunderclaps and hard leather. Eager still to do Ma’s important work. To spread the Word. To save himself and earn her unending love.

He remembers six like the throb in his gums when he lost his front teeth, startling at the soft sting of a wooden spoon on the seat of his shorts for idle chatter as he chopped carrots. Wearing hope like an ichthys, just beneath skin-deep. Out of belt reach. Unscratchable.

Six was a dusk age. The unraveling of Before.

At night there is only dark. Only terror and the scraped bowl hunger of After and palms split open like overripe fruit.

After was the too-big wool suit in summer that Ma ordered from a catalogue for two dollars and ninety-eight cents because the census man came banging around about mandatory schooling and little kids playing too near the soup pots.

After was broken glass mending itself and Chastity with her dolls on the pyre. Fourteen in a three dollar wool suit and old boots and a stutter, at the stove, chest shuddering over the burn hole that stitched itself back together almost before he could oversee the damage.

Chastity sang: My momma, your momma....

His nightmares always follow the same form now. He expects them like the plot twists in a book he has read so many times before. The fabric of the story is worn, tearing, beyond logic. The terror is rote. He sweats like weeping, like an ice box in summer.

They begin always with the hand across his mouth and nose and the bruising emptiness of his useless lungs in his chest. He sees his own lips turn blue the way Ma’s lips turned blue in the fever summer, the one that raked Faith and Abstinence in its unforgiving claws until they were nothing but cracked lips and eyes like cold puddles.

He still loves Ma, with her hair slicked flat to her head like a newborn colt’s; she’s only half so scary.

Come here, Credence. Come here to me.

Her lips crack, too. Her mouth a demon’s mouth, lined with fire, and he wants to run from her. Red dry hands hot on his arm, too tight. He stands as still as his body allows lest she remember and let go.

I’m here, Ma.

When I die, you must not let them burn my mortal body.

She lives.  
They bury Faith and Abstinence beneath the underflooring, Ma’s hand cold on his back as he crouches, carving their crosses into the floorboards.

(His name, Gellert says, is Aurelius. A molten, slippery word. A petal dropped from a poison flower. Try as he does, he cannot conform the rough shape of him to those liquid syllables. Credence Barebone was raised to fear, and he knows deep in his soul that this is his truth: Aurelius is of a pantheon to which he will only ever belong as a footnote.)

The images shift after Ma. He sweats like Cola in a diner glass.  
(Gellert, when he is feeling sweet, still offers to take him to dinner, sometimes, in the oak-paneled dining room. It’s never the same as before. The rich food makes his stomach heave.)  
And then they ascend on him:  
Ten or fifteen of them around the table; he can never get a good count. Their wands drawn, their white light that might be hell.  
It feels like fire.  
He wants to die here.

 


End file.
